AI for independent living at Dell InnovateFest

For its fourth edition, Dell Technologies challenged students from Singapore’s various Institutes of Higher Learning (IHLs), namely its polytechnics and autonomous universities, to build AI and cloud-native tools that help Persons with Intellectual Disabilities (PWIDs) and Persons with Disabilities (PWDs) live more independently as part of Dell InnovateFest 2026.

While Dell supplied the AI infrastructure for InnovateFest 2026, the problems came from the recipients of MINDS (formerly known as Movement for the Intellectually Disabled of Singapore) and SPD (formerly known as the Society for the Physically Disabled), with the students going into people’s homes to find out how they could help before they wrote any code.

The 52 finalists were selected from thousands of students across 10 institutions, then spent six weeks visiting care facilities, speaking with beneficiaries and testing ideas with real users before presenting their prototypes at the grand finals at National Gallery Singapore on 18 September.

That process was the whole point, according to Dell Technologies Singapore Vice President and Managing Director Andy Sim.

“Students were not solving hypothetical problems,” he said. “They are building for real people with real needs.”

Sim went further on who owns the results. The people who shared their experiences and tested early prototypes were, he told the room, “not just beneficiaries of these solutions, but the co-creators of them.” He added: “You reminded us that the best innovations are created with people, not merely for them.”

Polytechnic winner InSync tackles communication breakdowns

On the polytechnic track, Ngee Ann Polytechnic achieved success with InSync, a personalised voice and AI-supported communication facilitator built around a tablet.

The device helps a PWID handle the communication problems they run into day-to-day. Where a user isn’t comfortable with a generic device voice, InSync can synthesise one to speak on their behalf, converting text to speech and carrying emotion with it across four registers: happy, frustrated, angry and calm.

It answers one of the two challenges set this year, which Guest-of-Honour Edwin Tong, Minister for Law and Second Minister for Home Affairs, summarised as helping “persons with communication difficulties express themselves better and recover when conversations break down.”

Recovering when a conversation breaks down is one problem, starting a conversation is another, and getting back on track after a conversation derails mid-sentence is yet another, and it’s where most general-purpose assistive tools stop being useful. These are issues that InSync is meant to resolve.

The team received S$10,000.

University winner PotPal focuses on healthier choices

The National University of Singapore won the university track with PotPal, a healthy-eating diet companion.

The app takes a photo from a smartphone and returns a calorie count alongside a read on how healthy the meal is. It’s gamified, awarding points that users redeem for prizes, and the team said their goal is to get it into the Government’s Healthy 365 app, which already uses points and rewards to get Singaporeans tracking steps, logging meals and joining fitness programmes.

That puts PotPal on the other side of this year’s brief, in what Tong described as helping persons with intellectual disabilities and ordinary people “plan activities, make healthier choices, navigate everyday obstacles.” Independent living is mostly an accumulation of small daily decisions, and food is among the most frequent.

This team also received S$10,000.

The principle both winners share

Despite tackling different problems, both projects were built around the same idea of helping users do more for themselves.

“These solutions are not designed to make decisions for persons with disabilities,” Minister Tong said. “They are designed to give individuals greater agency.”

Here, the point was not to automate more tasks, but to help users handle more of those tasks on their own.

What MINDS and SPD got out of it

MINDS chief executive Kelvin Koh said the charity got more out of the arrangement than it expected. “What we did not anticipate was how much our own community would gain from the experience, the conversations, the prototypes, the sense that young people are investing their talents in solving these challenges.”

SPD chief executive Abhimanyau Pal made a similar point about method. “This human-centred approach is key to transforming promising ideas into practical solutions that make a meaningful difference in everyday life.”

The talent pipeline, stated plainly

The students got something out of it too, and Andy Sim was unusually direct about what.

Tay Jeung Hong competed in last year’s edition. His technical curiosity and problem-solving approach caught Dell’s attention, and the company hired him into its APJ AI Innovation Hub. This year he returned as a mentor, working alongside 2023 champion Ryan Sim on physical AI projects.

Andy Sim spelt out what that meant for the room. “So, to all the students here, you are definitely a potential hire. If you do well, you get hired. Dell InnovateFest is not just a competition, it is a talent pipeline, and today I dare say it is a community.”

Since 2023, the APJ AI Innovation Hub has put more than 11,000 students and working professionals through AI and cloud-native training. Other past finalists have taken internships and full-time roles at Dell and across its partner ecosystem.

Ask what AI should do

Minister Tong’s substantive argument challenged both the students and the way Singapore frames its AI ambition.

He pushed the students to use AI “not simply to demonstrate what AI can do, but to ask what AI should do to improve people’s lives.”

On why that suits Singapore, he made the small-country case, in that a country with no large domestic market, no natural resources, needs to competes on people and talent. “That’s Singapore’s secret strength, and that same approach must guide us in the use of AI.”

What happens to the projects now

Neither Dell nor the charities committed to taking InSync or PotPal further, with both projects still needing testing and refinement. PotPal, for example, hopes to further develop its app with Healthy 365’s help. 

The Minister made that point himself, telling the students that some ideas would evolve, some would change shape, and some would need more feedback before they were ready.

For now, InnovateFest matters less for whether these prototypes become products and more for how they were built.